Chapter One #2
By our second semester, for reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, Daisy’s stepdad stopped paying her tuition.
There was a fight on the phone. Tears. She wanted to stay in school, but her campus job at the student union coffee shop didn’t pay nearly enough to cover room and board and tuition.
She turned to her grandparents, but they were essentially broke.
Wealthy in name and real estate only. So Daisy got a job as a cocktail waitress at a triple-X strip club by the airport called the Landing Strip.
It didn’t take long to realize the real money was on the pole.
Three weeks later, Daisy was giving lap dances for twenty dollars a pop. She was still a virgin.
And then everything went dark.
We stopped talking. Daisy would skip class, sleep all day, her Laura Ashley comforter pulled over her head.
I’d bring her fruit and muffins from the cafeteria until it all began to rot, flies circling.
She made new friends, women who wore frosted lipstick and had names like Krystal and Amber.
They had toddlers and clit piercings and were generous with advice about body-hair removal and what type of handgun to buy.
I went to watch Daisy dance a couple of times.
She did this slow number to Nine Inch Nails.
I understood why men went nuts. She had skin like a blank page.
Thick, dark hair down to her mid back. Wide eyes.
A teeny elfin frame. And she could dance.
Maybe it was because she was an artist, and everything, even the platinum pole and the air that smelled like chicken wings and menthols, was like a canvas.
I sat on the edge of the chair, wondering if upholstery could transmit gonorrhea.
I didn’t like being there. Not because I was a prude, though I definitely was that.
Or because I was grossed out watching a teenager turn on middle-aged men.
That was obvious. I couldn’t stand seeing how much Daisy was enjoying it all.
Who was this girl? The way she ran a finger over a mustache, grabbed a paisley necktie, waved her butterfly wings and bare ass over an orthodontist’s erect lap, as if all those childhood ballet classes had prepared her for this.
I knew, watching her onstage, that I had lost her.
That there would be no going back to Comp Lit 101. No trips to Paris. No Cooper Union.
—
The final month of our freshman year, I came back from the library to find that Daisy’s side of the room had been cleaned out. The next day, a well-endowed, bubbly girl named Justine, a transfer from SMU, was hanging a Katy Perry poster above the bed.
The man who owned the Landing Strip had seen that Daisy was special.
Stripping became sex work. She dropped out.
Moved in with Krystal, then Amber, then who knows…
In a matter of months, Daisy had disappeared into a world I didn’t understand.
She called me a couple of times. She asked for money.
She asked if I wanted to buy heroin. She showed up at my twentieth birthday party strung out.
Took her Wet Seal halter top off. Gave my boyfriend a lap dance.
I was too young, too impossibly young, to know what to do.
I tried to get her help. I took her to an NA meeting.
I called her stepdad, her mom, busy on yet another marriage.
I called Grandma Queenie, who’d helped raise Daisy, but whose WASP delusions meant she couldn’t fully grasp the world in which her beloved granddaughter had landed, much less rescue her from that black hole.
I didn’t hear from Daisy for a couple of months, and then, on New Year’s Eve, she showed up, banging on the door of my off-campus apartment.
She said she’d kill herself if I didn’t give her money.
Kill herself if I didn’t buy her heroin.
I double-locked the doors, turned off the lights, cried listening to her yell from outside that it would be “all your fault!” if she wound up dead.
For months, I’d hoped that our friendship could survive the strain of addiction and mental illness, but that night, when I turned off the lights, I knew it had irrevocably broken.
We lost touch. I heard she moved to California to make adult art-house films. I blamed myself.
If anyone should’ve understood, been able to talk her back, had patience and empathy, it was me.
I tried to find her a couple of times over the years, through family, friends, but nobody knew anything.
Late nights, I’d stay awake scouring the internet, but whenever I thought I’d finally caught a glimpse of Daisy on some sick corner of the web, I’d click and it’d be gone. She’d be gone.
I graduated early and moved to New York.
I did open mic nights. I got a ridiculous nose ring that got infected and lasted a month.
I was broke and free and mostly happy. Sometimes, on my way home to the East Village apartment that I shared with Paul and his boyfriend, Tyrone, I would walk past the Cooper Union School of Art, stare at the students leaving with their portfolios and acrylic-stained Dickies, and imagine Daisy and me happy and sharing a cigarette at the big black cube at Astor Place on a warm Thursday night. I’d blink and the image would be gone.
And the summer several years ago when all anyone could talk about was the serial killer who was targeting sex workers on the South Shore of Long Island, all I could think about was Daisy.
I’d read everything I could find about the victims, looking for some unidentified girl who fit Daisy’s description. All of them did, and none of them did.